The week ahead – The morning after

After Bola Tinubu was declared the winner of Nigeria’s presidential election, he thanked his supporters and appealed to his dissatisfied rivals. Tinubu’s ruling All Progressives Congress party urged the opposition to accept defeat and not cause trouble after they had demanded a rerun, saying that delays in uploading election results had made room for irregularities. The parties now have three weeks to appeal the results, and both Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi have said they are headed to court. An election can be invalidated only if it’s proven the electoral body largely didn’t follow the law and acted in ways that could have changed the result. The Supreme Court has never overturned a presidential election.

We have published commentary on how the presidential election shaped up, but we think it is important to emphasise some key learnings from the country’s most competitive elections. 2023 is well on its way to being filed in the same shelf of Nigerian political history as the most flawed elections – chiefly the elections of 2003 and 2007. This is not to say that recent voting exercises were great, but the operational disenfranchisement of many voters last week artificially depressed official turnout to the point where this is the lowest voter turnout ever, and some of the state calls are so befuddling that no serious political observer believes they reflect Election Day realities. How the democratic transition is managed by all stakeholders will tell us a lot about the true resilience of Nigerian democracy. Additionally, regional federal politics may be firmly back. While Peter Obi was a galvanising force for many young and middle-aged urban and semi-urban voters, the sweep of states in his column – easily the best third-party haul in Nigerian electoral history – means that his true legacy may end up turning the Labour Party into the main opposition party in the South. Not since the days of Nnamdi Azikiwe and the Nigerian People’s Party in 1979 has a southern-led party come even close to a decent performance in federal elections. Mr Obi virtually eviscerated the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the South East and South-South and made large inroads into the Middle Belt. The sky may have been his horizon in a more competently managed exercise. If Labour deepens its roots and behaves like a proper party, it might be the spiritual successor to the various political iterations of Azikiwe’s movement. The first test of its durability comes up next week. The final major learning is that the PDP is well on its way to becoming a northern opposition party, although the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) will have something to say about it. Although we project that the PDP would hold the most governorships largely because of the nascent nature of the Labour and NNPP, it will suffer from its failure to deal with the fundamental problem that drove the G-5 governors to sabotage its efforts to win the key states of Oyo and Rivers. As a classic big-tent party, the PDP had always found a way to manage the conflicting interests of key stakeholders. Starting with Goodluck Jonathan’s botched management of the ‘New PDP’ faction who proved the missing piece the APC needed to ascend to Aso Rock in 2015, the umbrella party has lost its problem-solving skills. Post-2023, it will exist as a party of strange bedfellows held together solely by the party name. This de facto state of things will likely become de jure over the next one or two election cycles if Labour and the NNPP keep making electoral in-roads in traditional PDP-voting territories on both sides of the Benue River. In the final post-mortem, the 2023 contest will end up at the Supreme Court, which has never overturned a presidential contest in its 60-year history. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and much of the country riding on it, the odds do not favour a change in that institution’s behaviour. The final postscript of this maniac electoral adventure may have already been written.

Ghana’s Electoral Commission (EC)’s Deputy Chairman in charge of Corporate Services says his outfit is pushing for the passage of the Constitutional Instrument (CI) that seeks to make the Ghana Card the sole document for voter registration. However, the EC’s Chairperson, Jean Mensa, has revealed that the Ghana Card — a verification document issued to Ghanaians and permanently resident foreign nationals — will not be a requirement in the casting of votes in the 2024 General Elections, but will be the sole identity document used in the voter’s registration process for the acquisition of new Voters’ IDs.

Ghana has less than two years before it goes to the polls, and the first flashpoint in the electoral debate has been the effort to pass a new CI seeking to make the Ghana Card the sole legal identification means to enrol new voters onto the Electoral Commission’s voter register through the continuous voter registration exercise. The minimum age for acquiring a Ghana Card is 15. According to the 2021 Population and Housing Census (PHC), there are 19.9 million Ghanaians within this age range. Of those, about 2 million will be 18 by 2024, making them eligible to vote. The minority National Democratic Congress caucus has been at the forefront of the debate and has explicitly opposed the new CI, which has been tabled before parliament. Defending the government’s position, key cabinet members and senior election officials insist that they are committed to providing Ghana cards to qualified voters and funding the effort. The minority insist that the current government’s national security and election security commitments are insufficient. It is worth understanding what the new instrument aims to achieve. The CI seeks to facilitate year-round registration of eligible voters at election district offices. That is a significant change from the current system in which voter registration is only permitted briefly. The new instrument will empower citizens who turn 18 and hold a valid Ghana Card to walk to any EC district office across the country’s 16 regions to register. It is a sensible position on the face of it, but this debate is happening in the penultimate year before parliamentary elections. The minority caucus fears that the NIA may connive with the government to either slow the Ghana Card registration process or distribute in NDC’s strongholds and prioritise NPP districts. The caucus believes it may frustrate voters who could eventually decide not to obtain the card, disenfranchising them. Minority Leader Cassiel Ato Forson has accused the commission of planning to use the CI to rig the election in favour of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). The EC argues that the Ghana Card will deter foreigners and children from registering to vote and end the corruption-ridden guarantor system, which often encourages disputes, violence and labouriously expensive follow-up procedures. While the EC makes a sensible point, the question as to why it has chosen to implement this policy so close to the election is not an academic one. The minority caucus may play politics, but its concerns are not unfounded. The numbers at play here are not insignificant. As of 19 February, the authority had registered 17,375,861 Ghanaians aged 15 years or above on the national identity database and printed 16,737,734 cards. Of those, the number of registered Ghanaians aged 18 and above is 16.9 million, while the number on the EC voters’ register is 17,229,000. In other words, more than 100,000 likely voters are at play. In a tight electoral race, every vote counts. There is also the financial angle to consider. As the country struggled to service domestic and external loans, the NIA owes its main partners: The Identity Management Limited and CAL Bank. Due to payment challenges, the agency has 3.5 million unclaimed cards. A GH¢100 million facility taken out to ensure the 3.5 million cards are released is only 80% paid. Despite this turbulence, the NIA insists it has the technical and operational competencies to print, issue and distribute cards to citizens. Ghana typically has free, fair and plaid elections, but this will be one of its most closely fought. The current government has a parliamentary majority of one — an independent MP who closely aligns with the administration. Largely viewed as profligate and wasteful, Nana Akufo-Addo’s government is firmly on the ropes, and the NDC smells blood. All is up for grabs as the slow build-up to West Africa’s second most important democratic exercise heats up.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said Nigeria recorded a trade deficit of $20 million last November. The bank said aggregate export receipts declined by 7.7 per cent to $4.33 billion from $4.69 billion in October. Similarly, merchandise imports declined by 6.2 per cent to $4.35 billion from $4.64 billion in October. Crude oil and gas export receipts declined to $3.90 billion from $4.30 billion in October. In terms of share in total exports, crude oil and gas accounted for 90.2 per cent.

Nigeria’s trade balance was in the surplus between Q1 and Q3 2022, due mainly to high oil prices. Recall that in Q1 the Russia–Ukraine crisis triggered a sustained rally in oil prices amid supply disruption as Brent prices touched highs of $122.71 per barrel in June 2022. However, by July, it was clear that demand had started to wane. First, China initiated another wave of lockdowns that slowed demand. The US then released 180 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR), alongside an additional release of 60 million barrels from the International Energy Administration (IEA). In response to demand concerns, the OPEC+ consortium cut production significantly by 2 million barrels per day from November till the end of 2023. This cut was effective in the short run as it buoyed positive sentiment; however, prices continued their downward trajectory, dropping to $90.2 in September and closing the year at $85.91. LNG exports, a traditional overperformer, have weakened to the point that Nigeria has lost its status as Africa’s biggest exporter of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to Algeria despite record spot prices. On oil, Nigeria does not have a production issue; rather, it has struggled to control non-state entities who distort activities in the value chain while paying lip service to boost its non-oil production. CBN trade data explains why its head, Godwin Emefiele, bemoaned the lack of dollar remittances by the state oil company in November. Across the first 11 months of 2022 that the regulator released data, oil and gas comprised 88-94% of the country’s total exports. In November, Emefiele said the country had earned just $4.98 billion from non-oil exports. From our summation of the non-oil figures across the same period released by the bank, non-oil exports came in at $6.04 billion. The non-diversification of Nigeria’s forex sources has been tough for successive government administrations to chew on and resolve. They have used several policies to solve that problem and boost trade, but none has proved the silver bullet. The Export Expansion Grant (EEG), floated in 1986, had some brilliant ideas, including using a government-issued export credit certificate to settle taxes, purchase bonds and third-party transfers. It didn’t account for crumbling infrastructure, excessive documentation or the overdependence on Lagos as an exit point for Nigerian exports. The CBN launched the Race to 200 (RT200) scheme in February 2022 seeks to get local manufacturers to repatriate $200 billion into the Nigerian economy through the banking system by 2028. In the second RT200 summit in November, Emefiele said the CBN had disbursed ₦81 billion to exporters under the non-oil component of the programme. Out of the $4.98 billion earned by exporters, 1.96 or 39.36% qualified for rebates. Again, the macro challenges are biting hard at those efforts. At that same summit, the Director-General of the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Olawale Fasanya, reminded Mr Emefiele that exporters had little quality crops to work with from Nigerian farms — those spared by floods, herders, bandits and terrorists. None of the CBN or government-backed initiatives has programmed a quality assurance framework to upskill export-bound produce’s storage and processing component. The failed exportation of yams to the European Union and the United States in 2017 still hurts some exporters. Ghana’s yams have a duty-free pathway to the EU, while Nigeria, a major tuber producer, is locked out. In summation, Nigeria’s trade balance improved marginally due to oil receipts, with non-oil exports contributing very little to the country’s overall trading position. This unequivocally demonstrates Abuja’s inability to address issues facing the oil & gas industry as well as the failure of its expensive intervention programmes. Figuring out a way out will require dealing with the primary deficit driving these shortfalls — a deficit of will.

Simon Ekpa, the infamous pro-Biafra separatist agitator, was released in Finland last Friday, hours after he was arrested and grilled, according to the Finnish news outlet Helsingin Sanomat. “The person being questioned today is suspected of a crime. We will return to the title on Friday,” Tommi Reen from the Central Criminal Police told HS during a phone interview. Ekpa, a self-acclaimed disciple of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)’s leader, Nnamdi Kanu, had repeatedly ordered the people of the South-East to observe a sit-at-home and asked them to boycott the country’s general elections billed for Saturday.

Simon Ekpa’s arrest and release follows more or less a year of online petitions written by Nigerians, admonishing Helsinki and the Finnish people he serves to rein in his excesses after his rise as the face of the sit-at-home movement. That’s sort of putting it charitably. Mr Ekpa took on a more prominent role due to the enforced absence of Nnamdi Kanu and has constantly pushed for violent attacks against the democratic process and the economic interests of Nigeria’s Southeast to force Abuja to hold a referendum on the secession question. Seen through the narrow lens of the elections, his travails could be regarded as a victory for many of his detractors. More broadly, the jury is out on what this development really means. For starters, IPOB’s spokesman, Emma Powerful, announced in February just before the polls, that the group has not ordered any sit-at-home and should not be blamed for any election-day violence. This could be construed as IPOB playing a double game—resorting to its tried and tested tools of violence while claiming plausible deniability. The more pragmatic view is that these developments reveal the increasing factionalisation of a group that appears split along domestic and international lines. The home leadership, which Powerful belongs to, is under increasing pressure, not just from Nigeria’s security forces but also from increasingly disaffected residents within the region. The foreign group is bent on partying like it’s 1966. Something has to give soon enough. Furthermore, Simon Ekpa’s run-ins with the Finnish police might offer a sniff at IPOB’s future. Currently hedged between a rock and a hard place, the movement may be offered a new lease of legitimacy if a new administration not voted in by a majority of southeasterners mismanages that process. Therein lies the big X factor. If he is deported and handed over to Nigerian authorities, will he be simply questioned, investigated and charged to court for whatever offences his actions merit? Or would the incoming president, Bola Tinubu, choose to use Simon Ekpa and the already imprisoned Nnamdi Kanu as part of a strategy to reach a peaceful settlement with the separatist movement? Nothing about Mr Tinubu’s past suggests that he would take the latter option, but the possibility does exist, and it could be a useful public relations effort to launch his presidency in a part of the country where he cumulatively polled less than 130,000 votes. What is clear is that taking Simon Ekpa out of the picture could be the death knell of a group whose major lifeblood has been the sort of international funding for which Mr Ekpa served as a brilliant conduit. A lot can go right or wrong, depending on how Abuja plays its cards. Ekpa’s brief chat with the authorities may be the first of many steps that only close international collaboration and sensible politics can finally resolve.